a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.

Through their exuberant melancholia, Adam and Eve indeed apprehended the difficult joys of earning redemption. Through their absence from literal Eden, they found the invisible Eden dwelling in their own hearts. Through their nakedness and solitude, they came to weave beautiful and attractive tapestries. Without their hunger for the sorrowful knowl

We try to embrace, then, the sad fact that the world most wants to forget: we all die, and in our dying is, paradoxically, our living.

to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations.

melancholy connects us to our fundamental being.

people with “something eating at them” are more interesting than those who are merely content.

In contrast, melancholia (in my eyes) generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.

mortis? We wonder, then, if the obsession with happiness is, at the end of the day, a kind of unknowing necrophilia. We wonder if the desire for security is a hope for permanence, and we wonder if this hope for unchangeableness is a yen for death, the ultimate security blanket.

To strive to be happy all the time is necessarily to repress inevitable sadness.